STATE WATCH: Will Christie save civil service or hand it over to cronyism?

New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie announces a partnership between Cooper University Health Care and MD Anderson Cancer Center during a press conference at the State House in Trenton, N.J. Monday, June 10, 2013. (AP Photo/Rich Schultz)

After a period of brief peace, they’re at it again, those two old foes, Gov. Christie and the public-sector unions.

This time the flashpoint is the state’s venerable, nearly 100-years-old civil service system.

Christie is poised to push through a reform in the way the system handles promotions. He’s doing it by using a flanking maneuver to neutralize the Democratic legislature.

His reform would limit testing in favor of allowing supervisors to make promotions.

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Such agreements as the two sides have regarding what’s at stake only intensifies their dermination to have at it.

Both agree the viability of the civil service system rises or falls on the outcome.

Christie says he’s saving the civil service system from its own inefficient, ponderous, bureaucratic self.

Hetty Rosenstein, state leader of the Communication Workers of America, the biggest of 13 state government unions, told a heated hearing that Christie’s out to do no less than “destroy” the system.

CWA and other Christie foes say the governor is flat out flouting the state’s Constitution.

They cite chapter and verse — Art. VII, sec. 1. par. 2. It states in part that civil service promotions “shall be made according to merit and fitness to be ascertained as far as practicable by examination....”

Exactly, counters the Christie administration. It cites the very same provision at the beginning of its 96-page-long reform proposal.

The clunkiness of the system undermines the implied constitutional mandate for an efficient civil service, says the administration.

The Christie forces stress the “as far as practicable” part. The rigmarole of announcing a test, holding it, posting eligibles from the results, announcing a promotion and then, all too often, dealing with time-consuming appeals, sabotages effective management, they contend. They say the proposed reform “streamlines” management.

But a riled-up chorus of Democratic legislators has joined the union voices. What Christie is proposing to streamline, they say, is a return to the old-time spoils system. “We’re marching backwards 100 years,” says Assemblyman Herb Conoway Jr., D-Burlington.

The proposal — pending before the solidly pro-Christie Civil Service Commission, with four members and one vacant seat — is starting to reverberate across the political landscape.

State Sen. Linda Greenstein, D-Monroe, raises the specter of political patronage running rampant through the ranks of state, municipal and county government, where 125,000 or more jobs eventually might be affected by Christie’s plan in the way it touches on not only promotions but possibly also layoffs.

Greenstein heads a 14th District legislative ticket that’s facing an all-out challenge by a Republican ticket led by Peter Inverso of Hamilton, who previously held the Senate seat. The wary Inverso ticket has urged the administration to proceed with caution and make sure, especially, that veterans’ preferences under existing civil service rules are protected. The administration emphatically dismisses Democratic alarms that such preferences are potentially compromised by the reform. The district extending across the Mercer-Middlesex County line, is a rich lode of state employe votes.

Sen. Barbara Buono, the Democratic gubernatorial nominee, is also citing the Civil Service reform as an anti-Christie battle cry, giving some Democrats the hope the issue might help resuscitate her campaign which, according to polls so far, is flat-lining. Public-sector unions constitute a big Democratic political force in New Jersey. CWA represents local as well as state government employees, as well as some in the private sector.

Legislative Democrats including Assemblyman Reed Gusciora, Princeton, meanwhile, are rallying under the banner of a resolution decrying the Christie civil service initiative as the prelude to “political coercion,” “cronyism” and “discrimination.”

All of which to the Christie administration is partisan hyperole.

Christie has cited civil service reform as an efficiency instrument urgently needed in his “toolkit” to enable local officials to reduce property taxes, on average statewide the nation’s highest. The Christie reform proposal, however, cites no specific cost savings in the economic-impact section. The section says the reform will have no effect on jobs.

Past governors have urged their own versions of civil service reform to no avail, including Republican Christine Whitman and Democrat Jim Florio. The influential League of Muncipalities also has championed reform.

Christie moved to effect reform administratively, through the Civil Service Commission, outflanking the Legislature, after vetoing a Democratic reform bill as a reform in name only — “meaningless,” he declared. He likely would veto any bill to undo his reform plan, and Democrats likely wouldn’t be able to muster the two-thirds vote for a veto override.

Which leaves the courts the likely next battlefield after a Civil Service Commission vote.

The Christie reform (officially, “Proposed New Rule: N.J.A.C.4A:3-3.2A”) in some respects reads almost like a legal brief in anticipation of a legal challenge. It argues that New Jersey’s civil service statute gives the commission supervisory and other “personnel authority” to fashion an efficient system. It says that the New Jersey courts for more than 60 years have allowed the commission to “waive competitive examinations on the grounds of impracticality, as long as the waiver was not arbitrary, capricious or unreasonable.”

A 32-page summary of the reform says the state judiciary — an “apt model” — already uses the procedures Christie recommends. The Treasury Department also has “successfully” used them in a pilot program, according to the administration.

“In the last calendar year alone,” it adds, “74 state service promotions and 83 local service promotions (29 county and 54 municipal) have demonstrated how advancement based on relative knowledge, skill and abilities can be achieved without resorting to formal examination procecdures.”